Bigger, better, faster: Keeping pace with the world of next-generation mobile advertising

As consumer technology use trends more toward mobile platforms, marketers and advertisers are racing to keep up.

People are using their phones more than ever, surfing between apps and activities, making it difficult for brands to interact in real time. How advertisers shift with this trend will determine their success and standing in the market.

To be successful in today’s mobile advertising market will require a “real-time” boost. This is especially true for organisations that provide detailed, analytics-powered mobile ad campaigns for wireless carriers.

The Cost of Slow Data Processing

Mobile advertising typically involves managing as many transactions as possible, requiring rapid ingestion and export of data flows. However, more customers and increased data use bring more transactions, which in turn drives the need to manage larger volumes of information. However, mobile platform providers still need to process transactions fast enough to align advertising purchases with customer budgets.

For example, if an advertiser only wanted to spend $10 a day, and the advertising platform provider sold them $12 worth of ads because the data wasn’t correlated quickly enough, the provider would have to absorb the difference. A better approach that enables advertising platform providers to scale more cost effectively – without sacrificing speed – is a necessity.

Traditional database systems are too slow to ingest mobile data, analyse it in real-time and make the budget-conscious decisions that mobile advertising platform providers, and their customers, require. Mobile ad providers need a solution that delivers smart data in real time, while maintaining the ability to handle the increasing volume of transactions taking place among the millions of mobile phones (and users) connected to the advertising platform.

Real-time Analysis for Immediate Recommendations

Working with an in-memory, SQL database that enables the real-time analysis of fast, smart data is one way to stop mobile ad-spend overages. This solution combines the capabilities of an operational database, real-time analytics, and stream processing in one easy-to-use platform. With the performance of in-memory, the scalability of NoSQL and the transactional consistency of traditional relational databases, a mobile advertising network can now effectively process massive volumes of traffic.

By supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections with round-trip latencies in milliseconds, advertisers can manage their content in real time and provide pertinent recommendations to users at the most relevant moments. The speed of a real-time platform can lead to maximum exposure for ads, a monumental advantage in an era (and on platforms) where consumers constantly split their attention across multiple apps or devices.

Realising the Benefits

With a SQL approach, mobile advertising platform providers will be able to meet the rising demands of the evolving mobile marketing field, provide real-time analytics at scale and eliminate over-delivery of mobile ads. With key audiences including advertisers, fraud teams, publishers and executives, this change enables ad providers to aggregate custom data much faster.

And there are a number of surprising technical benefits to in-memory database platforms, including a decreased load on application servers, the elimination of the response time from database servers, and improved server infrastructure efficiency that can reduce server infrastructure costs by as much as 80 per cent.

In a world that’s being defined by exponential data growth, more information about consumer behaviour is now available for analysis. In 2020, Gartner predicts there will be 25 billion connected devices to fuel the Internet of Things, requiring constant connectivity. While few doubt the fast rate at which people are adopting connected devices around the world, the major question is how – and if – marketers can keep up with the speed and scale of consumer data.

Implementing the right technology to best serve advertisers and their consumers has been the way forward for mobile advertising platform providers.